A deep inside look at digital security threats and human behavior through various verticals. “Business firms seem to have forgotten that hackers target human vulnerability and weakness to break the organization,” says Rohyt Belani, Co-founder and CEO, PhishMe. “According to Belani, 95 percent of the organizations use the wrong mechanism to ensure security and do not train humans to be vigilant about the attacks.”Read More

With December upon us and 2014 almost in the books, it’s a perfect time to take a look back at the year that was, from a phishing standpoint of course. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we are constantly analyzing phishing emails received and reported to us by PhishMe employees. What was the most interesting phishing trend we observed in 2014? While attackers are loading up their phishing emails with new malware all the time, the majority of their phishing emails use stale, recycled content.

It’s about the time of year when people should be receiving tax refunds from the IRS, which gives attackers a great opportunity to craft phishing emails. PhishMe users recently reported a round of phishing emails purporting to be from the IRS about tax refunds:

Canary, the leading-edge v36 of the Google Chrome browser, includes a new feature that attempts to make malicious websites easier to identify by burying the URL and moving the domains from the URI/URL address bar (known in Chrome as the “Omnibox”) into a location now known as “Origin Chip”. In theory, this makes it easier for users to identify phishing sites, but we’ve discovered a major oversight that makes the reality much different.

Canary is still in beta, but a flaw that impacts the visibility of a URL is typically something we only see once every few years. We’ve discovered that if a URL is long enough, Canary will not display any domain or URL at all, instead showing an empty text box with the ghost text “Search Google or type URL.” While Canary is intended to help the user identify a link’s true destination, it will actually make it impossible for even the savviest users to evaluate the authenticity of a URL.

A Target spokesperson confirmed last week that attackers initially gained access to the company systems through stolen credentials obtained through a vendor. While Target has not confirmed the exact method through which the credentials were stolen, one possible scenario is that attackers sent a spear-phishing email to the vendor, obtained valid login credentials for Target, and used those credentials to gain a foothold in Target’s network.

When the Syrian Electronic Army nailed a number of prominent media outlets earlier this year, we were pleased to see a number of open and honest responses from those that were breached, notably from The Onion and The Financial Times.

Last week, the SEA was at it again, successfully hacking content recommendation service Outbrain, an attack which provided a foothold to compromise media behemoths The Washington Post, Time, and CNN. The SEA attacked Outbrain with largely the same tactics it has used so successfully in the past few months, by eliciting log-in credentials through a phishing email, the same tactics PhishMe simulates in our data entry scenarios.